Nepenthe
Rexxitor. Biology nerd. Roguelites, indie games, and TRPGs. Drowning in unused yarn, unread books, and mandatory cat hair.
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How did I forget about that cloak!? I got that before reloading because I kept failing my attempts to steal all my money back. I didn’t expect all of those to be so addictive. I loved it.
My personal favorite was the boots that grant their wearer misty step for the tradeoff of leaving all your other clothes in a pile at your starting point. Still kinda sad I couldn’t snag those again.
Up til now, we’ve had:
• The sudden realization that you can bathe and don’t have to crunch around in weeks of dried gore
• The further realization that at least one npc mentions you stink and should probably do something about that
• Standing relatively close to a waterfall for a few minutes if you can find one, or perhaps walking at a normal pace through a really deep puddle.
• Sophisticated method — stealing a water bottle, throwing it really hard at the floor, and hoping the splashback is enough
After months of steady work, we can use the soap now, but you’re going to have to give your fellow gamers a minute to get used to things before you start making other suggestions
AI-generated maps and NPCs might be ok. Ditto fights, though there would have to be playtesters whose job it is to make sure the result is something winnable and acceptably fair.
The main issue there would be that there IS no continual certainty of that. You’d have to either be able to rerolled entire encounters — which would be jarring — or force the AI to DM what happens when you lose an impossible battle — far more rewarding, provided it doesn’t keep doing it. But it may keep doing it. This would be impossible to ever test adequately. Every game on the market may be a hard mode Bethesda game.
I personally really don’t think I’d enjoy something with a randomly generated cast/main story for the same reason I wouldn’t be interested in owning one singular book whose writing changes every time you read it. I don’t play to kill time; I play for the stories and I get attached like hell to the good ones. I replay them ad nauseam because I miss the characters.
I think it would be an intensely entertaining idea either as a New Game+ or for those games to have a wildcard setting that you could turn on and off. That way, there’s no lack of devs who get to tell the tale they wanted and players can mix it up when they’re bored. Otherwise, you’ve downgraded the job of the entire company to filling the AI in on background lore and nothing else.
Other aspects:
• for those that do get attached and wanna re-experience it, you’d need a way to save the information behind the game you just played. That file might be fairly gigantic?
• Would also lead to a weird market for other peoples’ saves. The way modders already make quests, but for an entire plot.
• NPCs and party members that all look like randomized sims.
If I understand, the argument is that someone who doesn’t want to be spoiled for endings should…look at a headline purported to be specifically about endings, and then read the article to see if it’s about endings, which they are not going to do because there is an extraordinarily high chance it’s exactly what it says it is in big letters, and any failure to voluntarily read spoilers they don’t want to be spoiled for is then a failure on the part of the player?
That feels like reaching. Would rather not be mean. I think people stranded on top of zombie infested buildings whose only method of escape is a single in-use helicopter have reached less.
This is just a justification to brush off anyone who opens their mouth at all, because were there a reader who did for some reason want to click on every headline they didn’t want to know about in order to make sure they shouldn’t have clicked on it, that would definitely still be something that is their fault once they saw anything they shouldn’t.
Even leaving aside why someone would do that, the OP made the conscious decision to post it like they did.
They could have tipped everyone off to the clickbait. They could have used a spoiler tag if they didn’t bother reading it or wanted to play into the clickbait. They chose to do neither. That has nothing to do with the journalistic integrity of online gaming mags. This was a personal mistake.
I have seen communities be shockingly good about respecting this. The Hades community especially is amazing and, though the game has been out now for so many years the sequel is nearing completion, they’d probably still just give you what bare advice they have to based on your current status and tell you to keep playing because “trust me.”
I don’t know why the bg3 community wants to pretend it’s impossible and out of their hands, while swearing it shouldn’t matter anyway. It very well is, and for a game this stunning, it absolutely does.
Unless you’ve forcibly seen most of them and you can pick out what moments go where because x action, or you have this one singular shred of information that happens to be the integral piece to draw together an entire arc.
Earlier this week, I was listening to music on YouTube and saw a thumbnail that told me exactly what was up with the tadpoles. Not even the title. I don’t remember what the title was. It was written on the thumbnail in giant glaring yellow letters.
If I am to play this game. I cannot have access to the internet in any conceivable way. I had thought this problem only extended to forums and news sights, places that were fairly obvious and thus easily avoided, but it’s the entire internet when you least expect it.
I’m a third of the way into act 2 and the only teammates whose important plot moments and/or multiple endings I don’t know are Wyll and Lae’zel, and that’s only because nobody likes them enough to be talking about them.
I have tried to avoid this shit at every turn. It’s still a great game. It’s fantastic. It would have been in my top 3 if I could have played the damn thing on my own. I fucking love picking things to shreds more than anything else and there are so many pressing unknowns and conflicting motivations that I’d be having the time of my life. You don’t understand. I could write a whole thesis on any one of them.
But I know the answers already. I’m kind of convinced the reason I’ve found myself so much more attached to side characters like Mol, Oliver, etc. over most of the main story npcs is because they weren’t important enough for anyone to ruin them for me.
She hadn’t even told me about the religious stuff yet when the option came up. Although if you read her mind about it as a woman, not only is she dead serious, she’s deeply confused and embarrassed to be realizing she’s bisexual.
No interest in doing a male file in order to find out whether Gale, Wyll, etc. would react with the same awkwardness, but I felt that. Normally, the devs just address it by making everyone openly bi from the get-go, and I appreciated the smallest shred of realism.
On one front, if not the other. I’m not really interested in a lot of her fighting style, so we’ve barely spoken.
Xenophobia isn’t really my bag. It comes off bordering vicious puritanism and I’m left wondering whether it’s the result of being ignored, or just the reason. I sat and did my work too, but goddamn.
I think the whole thing is fine, just…progressing way too fast to be believable, and hard to be “friends” without being cruel.
If we’re talking about the nudist option, I’ve been continually asking myself why that exists when we already know why. It’s eyebrow raising but if I wish it were the worst thing happening to me today. I can grumble and move on.
I find the writing for each more or less appreciable, but I do think they need to slow their damn roll, definitely. Not only do all but two of them want me, somehow I ended up reaching this point at the exact same time with all of them and we might as well have solved the whole thing by massive camp orgy and called it a day.
I’m quite sure some of this can be gated behind specific plot points so the progression makes sense. I’m over here completely ignoring the plot for the side quests in Act 1.
Asterion says he “knows a place,” which is predictable because Asterion would bang a tree if it weren’t for the cock splinters. But he also very specifically said that same day that he’s never been to the underdark before, and he literally can’t know a place. We just passed an NPC that told us not to make the slightest perceptible noise or we’d attract ravenous monsters and we’re going to be murdered.
Maybe we should wait to offend god until after we get outside, perhaps?
Yeahhh. Even if they reverted everything, brought back the apps, and released a scheduled weekly video of Spez crying as different mods whip him with a belt, I am not interested.
Reddit can do whatever. I found an adequate replacement due to the protests, and I took it in direct response to Spez’s clockwork PR disasters, so the protests did not fail for me.
Interesting read that should have gone without saying to anyone trying to manage a company, what trust thermoclines are and how to avoid them.
Judging the worth of the protests depends on what your individual goal was. If it was convincing reddit admins not to cut and run with a giant pile of free money, now you know better. Nothing in the company’s history made me think they were the type, which is itself a warning sign.
If it was reddit going down in flames, that’s always a slow burn and seems nigh unavoidable for any company as the years stretch on and management grows complacent, but they visibly did damage themselves because you’re reading this.
And it was enough damage that several hundreds of thousands don’t really mind making their home at a competitor instead. It’s only going to get worse, not because they don’t already have millions of users who didn’t leave, but because they have a solid reputation for never listening to those millions.
The protest was a death sentence because their proven problem solving method is to ignore the problems as they mount.
I think this especially stems from how those games are seen by some more asshole-ish people. Few would disagree that strategy RPGs are not gaming, but I’ve had a clerk at gamestop lecture me about how my then-favorite title wasn’t a “real” part of the series. So it’s still my favorite, but I don’t bring it up anymore.
For much the same reason, there’s an internalized mental block concerning whether or not something like The Sims, Stardew, Animal Crossing, etc. are “real” games because they don’t really have a goal or require the same level of skill. If someone asks me what I play, I’m going to mention Hades before I ever breathe a word about Slime Rancher because one of those is going to get me stereotyped and insulted.
If all I played were really chill, micromanaging “girl games,” I just wouldn’t say anything and would have doubts about describing myself as being on the level “gamer” normally entails.
Probably 3 minutes, tops, in a neutral setting, but every reddit employee and pro-dumbass mod knows that’s the first thing anyone is going to do, so they’ll be up all night alongside their bots, cheating and shadowbanning like last time. Not that I’m naming names, Chtorr.
No way under god will they allow the kinds of things users are about to depict happening to spez
For Steam specifically, it’s:
• Hades (214hrs)
• Octopath Traveler (111hrs)
• Skyrim (94hrs)
I should have guessed it would be Hades, but I’m really surprised to see Octopath up there instead of Slime Rancher, which somehow is way down there even though it feels way more fun. Since when has fun made something seem longer?
In general, without question:
• The Sims (played semi-religiously for almost a decade til the file became too big for my crappy laptop to risk adding any more GB to)
• Skyrim again (starting over just isn’t the same once you’ve hit lvl 81, and I am grieving)
• Disgaea (bought 3 separate times because my sibling kept selling it to buy other things, and then a fourth when I got out on my own. Conservatively, I have beaten that game a minimum of 9 times. Would play again.)
This would be way more common if I could find adequate discussion of any game I’ve played that wasn’t either a single question on Steam or a forum post from 2005. Don’t care how old or obscure, I’ve never gotten tired of something yet.
Just doesn’t tend to be a lot of it, with the exception of Hades (whose community I think is still straddling both sites) and slime rancher (whose update spoilers I am avoiding for at least the next entire year).
Rocket Knight Adventures, back on the Genesis. Not the easiest game, and the “jumping from platform to platform by your tail” was ass to get the hang of in a boss fight, but I miss when games weren’t so serious about themselves and you could just play something for a while. Sometimes I really want a grand statement that will leave me in a crying heap. Sometimes it’s nice to just be a possum in jet-propelled plate mail.
The post can, yeah. The predictability with which all posts or comments containing the word “Google” will have several responses underneath evangelizing Firefox almost certainly will not, after it exceeds a point it very clearly routinely exceeds.
Not because you guys are wrong, (you’re not), but because you’re annoying, which is almost as bad. There is something in psychology called reactance theory, and it’s the reason why, when you’re just about to do the dishes and then someone else tells you to do them, it’s suddenly the last thing on earth you want to do.
It is a choice so small it isn’t worth arguing over, but it’s no longer your choice born out of your own free will, and now you feel cheated and resentful and you are not doing it, both out of spite and more truthfully to regain your sense of choice.
This is the same reason everyone hates vegans so much. They’re not wrong. They’re annoying. Firefox has vegan PR.
I held off listening to Hamilton for three years for no other reason than nobody else I met would shut the goddamn fuck up about Hamilton. Same with the TV version of Good Omens, whatever stupid cartoon jester thing has been in a third of the memes lately, and a hundred other things.
I am very likely to switch over to Firefox myself in the ever-nearing future. That ice is breaking. But it will not be because a bunch of strangers whined at me over my own choices for over a decade. It will be because the cons of whatever Google, Windows, etc. have done finally outweigh the pros of not having to exert effort to maintain my experience.
It bears consideration that in the meantime, Firefox users have a tendency not to even read the several duplicate comments before they start jacking off into them, not uncommonly in a way that’s loudly judgemental towards their own target audience.
The resultant spam cements a mental association between Firefox, the brand and the feeling of being annoyed and insulted. Don’t be those vegans. If I had to think, be like the art community treats Adobe. Fuck Adobe, but I’m not just gonna overload someone with aggressive pompousity who’s only using the industry default.